


Team Spirit

by Catznetsov



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Angel/Demon Relationship, M/M, Non-Chronological, Temporary Character Death, Under-negotiated Kink, let's be honest it's everybody/everybody, minivans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-02-12 18:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12966186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catznetsov/pseuds/Catznetsov
Summary: “I got pizza,” Sasha says brightly. “Also coffee, milk—you always forget, let it go bad—but also vegetable, very important for growing young hunters! Also, witch’s head, but that’s mine.”Braden looks like he’d be praying, if he could anymore. But he takes a grocery bag and waves Sasha in.





	1. Chapter 1

“Sasha, Sasha. You hurt me like this," Tom’s body says, Lucifer ripping through his voice. “And you expect Hell to follow you? We would have loved you, if you could just follow the rules.”

“Objection,” Sasha says. “Demons are selfish. What’s more selfish than betray everything ‘cause I wanna fuck an angel? I'm best demon.”

His fingers spasm in the cold, curling around Nicky’s blade. The little finger bone he once sacrificed for time is stinging ice, but under his palm he feels tightly-wound electric joy. If he tipped his head back the sky must be the color of Nicky’s grace.

Wherever Nicky’s been sent now, he isn’t gone. As long as Sasha is, he will belong to someone.

“You think that’s weakness in how you make us,” he tells his creator. “No. That’s how we make ourselves. You can’t imagine how proud they’ll be to watch me win.”

 

* * *

 

 

Every plank in the walls of the little house had been washed there by the bay, soaking through with salt. Some Braden had shaped from whole logs, while others came drifting down as empty fishermen’s houses on the neighboring islands slipped from their thin foundation. He’d laid them out in bleached lines at the head of the beach to cure until the salt crackled and glinted in the sun. When they were dry he’d pinned the frame, laid a floor and caulked the outer walls with seaweed gathered in swirling armfuls from the water.

Some old hunters built panic rooms. When Braden had left the Life and stomped out into the sea, he’d built his house without a basement and not a single iron nail or filing. Sasha had watched from a safe ways across the tide flats, and thought the rum-spiced logic might be that you could trust iron, until it rusted out on you. So better trust nothing, and drown it all with salt.

By this point the man’s practically pickled, which does dull the otherwise lovely prospect of eating him enough for Sasha to keep his teeth to himself. The minivan is parked out front and the screen door slaps open before he can knock, which is annoying, because he definitely would have. Brushing the salted wood just stings his knuckles, and Sasha’s been working on pretending that’s not obnoxious.

“I got pizza,” Sash says brightly. “Also coffee, milk—you always forget, let it go bad—but also vegetable, very important for growing young hunters! Also, witch’s head, but that’s mine.”

Braden looks like he’d be praying, if he could anymore. But he takes a grocery bag and waves Sasha in.

Sasha’s feet shush across the driftwood floor. Pale motes eddy up and scurry off into the corners. You’d think they were only stray beach sand, if you’d never seen Braden on a cleaning spree, and you didn’t have Sasha’s eyes to see the books lining every wall. The dust in Braden’s house is papery with flaking, crumbling spells. In the kitchen the radio is playing softly, and he can hear the boys sleeping roughly upstairs.

“Were you followed?” Braden asks, leaning in the doorway. He always asks. Sasha has been a Lord of Hell for centuries and even he’s given up resocializing him.

“Oh, yeah,” Sasha says, and jerks a thumb back at his refrigerator bag. “Why you think I have a witch’s head, Holtby?”

Braden deposits it on the counter. “You don’t need to behead witches.”

“Works great, though,” Sasha says, investigating the cupboards. “So tell somebody that’s never been one.”

If Tom were awake, he’d lean in to ask if that’s how Sasha died, _how they got him_ , with his particularly impish, vicious enthusiasm for old stories of heroic hunters, winning the day. Sasha would lean in too, waiting to hear his brother shift and Braden tense, and say, _which time?_

Braden only says, “I’ll make pancakes.”

 

* * *

 

 

While Braden is fussing with the frying pan, Sasha takes a cup of coffee and his head into the study. He sets the bag in the middle of the open floor and sits cross-legged in front of it, unzips the zipper just enough to let air in, and waits until he feels the kick of a triggering Spell of Life.

“This,” he says, wiggling his newly-whole fingers just out of biting range, “is why I tell you, Russian spell is better. Tie your life to little bit of bone, it focuses the spell. You want keep coming back just a head?”

Without lungs to draw breath the response is barely a growling whisper, but Sasha flicks the refrigerator bag for rudeness anyway.

“Sure, I take you back,” he says, and takes another drag of coffee. “Tell me where I find the book. Before I forget what ditch I leave your body in, yeah?”

 

* * *

 

 

The boys come downstairs not long after Sasha finishes up. Tom and TJ stumble down first, trailing whiskey fumes and a fair amount of Evgeny’s blood; Evgeny follows, bandaged but sober. They’ve been up in the Appalachians, which Evgeny seems to genuinely like as much as the wild things that live there like trying to eat his face.

This time a hidebehind had been feasting on day hikers’s livers, and it all ended with TJ and Tom drunk off their feet to discourage the creature and Evgeny oozing and insisting he had to be the one to drive the minivan home.

It’s heartwarming, really, to see the everyday hardworking haints and hallows are just as eager to eat him as they were before he was an archangel’s under armour. It’s all so far above their heads that it’s completely irrelevant. Sasha loves all his simple subjects, happy to gnaw where angels and demons would fear to tread.

“Thanks, Sasha,” TJ says. He’s still wide-eyed and twitchy from the drive, wincing away from windows. “Real glad to know you care.”

“Hey, hey,” Tom says, and offers Sasha a slow fist bump that doesn’t make contact, either because he’s seeing double or in deference to Braden’s sensibilities. His brother waves and slouches into the kitchen to get under Braden’s feet.

They eat there in the kitchen, hastily clearing the stacks of grimoires and Braden’s puzzle books.  
Everyone at the table is moving warily, careful of the secrets tucked up their shirtsleeves. No one needs to notice if Sasha, who does not need to eat, is calculating every movement so his arm never brushes Evgeny’s as they reach for pancakes.

His skin would burn Sasha more than salt, now. More than the scent of pancakes and syrup, more than salt, drying blood and lemon Pinesol and the tinge of seaweed Braden can’t quite get rid of, it’s the faint trace of that dry electric cold that fills Sasha’s mouth and nose whenever he breathes in. The humans can’t smell it, but inside they all know the taste. The spasm at the nape of your neck, pressure on your tongue. Wrath, but more will—and they’ve all known Nicky.

That’s how angels taste.

At least it’s better than teenage boy. Evgeny catches him glancing and clicks his tongue. Sasha bares his teeth affectionately at him, and then Tom nearly knocks both their plates off the edge.

“I heard him, though!” he's telling TJ. “Come on, Tee, you gotta’ve heard it too.”

“I don’t know, Tommy,” TJ says. He has to prop himself up on one elbow, in what turns out to be the butter dish. “Maybe I was asleep.”

“No, you kept saying you were gonna throw up, and then you did a minute later when Jenny tried to merge,” Tom says. “So you were awake enough to roll the window down.”

“Okay, so I was busy,” TJ says. He looks at the butter, makes an apologetic face at Braden, and scrapes some off for his pancakes, apparently with a monumental effort.

“What did we hear?” Evgeny asks.

“You were busy,” his brothers both say, and TJ’s eyes catch on Sasha before he makes himself busy stuffing buttered pancake in his mouth.

“I heard Nicky,” Tom says, staunchly. “On the radio.”

“Maybe you were asleep,” TJ says around his pancakes.

“So maybe I was. Maybe it was another dream, you know? Maybe he’s reaching out.”

“Why would he be reaching out to you, though?” Evgeny says, leaning forward. “What?” to TJ’s reproving glare. “Nicky’s weird about Tommy, he’s always been weird, come on. I’m not saying you’re making it up.”

“You kind of are.”

“Well, what’d he say?”

Tome gathers all his dignity. “It was one of those contemporary Christian music stations,” he says. “They finished up a set of Christian rock and then Jenny swerved and then I think they said it was an interview, some faith healer, but they got him on and it was Nicky. He said, ‘I don’t think I’m meant to talk to you now,’ and then their equipment shorted out.”

“Okay, so maybe you heard Nicky,” TJ allows. Sasha doesn’t have to look up to know his and Braden’s eyes are fixed on Sasha.

Despair just tastes like pancakes.

Sasha has felt this tugging absence longer than he can remember. Since his second death, his third? He’d stopped feeling anything from inside himself, just letting whatever the world decided to show him wash over him, and so much of it had been bloody. And then he’d bet Hell on TJ’s lovely, toasty golden soul—and Heaven sent Nicky to steal it back. The alien light of an angel’s blade had burned enough of Sasha’s fellow demons, and he’d slammed through Sasha, unprepared to face a being he’d almost stopped believing in, as if Sasha wasn’t there. Sasha had been fascinated.

Somehow, inevitably, that had led them all here, to pancakes. An ease that would be comfortable, if they weren’t missing the only thing that made it make sense.

Sasha has run his fingers over all their souls, but they own him, and almost everyone here knows it. As long as Nicky—what, drew breath? But angels don’t. As long as Nicky is, Sasha will belong. Sometimes it staggered him to think of all the time Nicky had been. All Sasha’s long life and death, the wonder of him has been somewhere out there, a vastness like the unencompassed arch of sky you can only express in silence or screaming for joy.

Tom might need a little more time to work it out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the stunning and insightful sin bin prompt,
> 
> "Consider: Nicky the continually exasperated angel. Alex the friendly neighborhood demon. TJ & Kuzy & Willy the hunters. Holts the loremaster Bobby Singer type."
> 
> I'll be posting these as I write them, in mostly-chronological order. I did consider looking up what things happened on Supernatural, but then I thought I could just watch that Dean: Xs and Os vid a few times instead.
> 
> OP, you should contact me, I have a lot of thoughts about TJ's sensible hunter-mom minivan


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe I should adjust the relationship tags. Uh. It’s really a free-for-all, you all.  
> I'm...experimenting.

Sasha has seen holy—but not _too_ holy—women and men drink salt and lacquer to keep the devil out. If they were holy enough then God would have kept them by will alone, but Sasha had known His disinterest for centuries.

Maybe once, when he was human, still eighteen and with the dirt of a family garden under his fingernails, he had felt the touch of glory, seen it in the brilliant broken sky over Moskva-reka as he worked the first of the new city’s miracles. Grand princes and their armies, his once-fellow laborers, a fledgling nation had certainly believed he did. But if God ever made Sasha and his gifts, in the long years between Sasha’s first death and the last one He made clear He didn’t want to be thanked for it.

Sasha had seen the absence of Heaven, first on Earth for seven brittle lifetimes and then as he kept his faithful watch over the crossroads through the mists, every stranger’s dull desperate midnight leaching away his last memories of light and color. And when it almost passed under so many others’ attention, he had seen the soul that would drag all Heaven’s eyes back where they belonged, on him.

Not little Tommy’s—Sasha, frankly, had been bored of listening to his then-King growl over darling one-day vessels like an old dog over wandering puppies. No, Sasha had stood up in the halls of the great Lords of Hell, where the Petty King of the Crossroads was so rarely welcomed, and bet them all he could bring the end times in a year and bring Tom to heel with a simple deal: one brother’s soul for the other’s. Or the others’—the boys are limitlessly loyal, and not so good at math.

He tells them exactly what he’ll do.

“A year,” his King said, disbelieving, laughing. “Then win your one-or-two souls within the year, and our Creator will thank you for it, I’m sure.”

Sasha throws his arms out wide when he bows, bares his teeth, laughs as they do. They think he’s an idiot; then they’ll think he’s a traitor. Some will think he must be clever, and they’ll start to tell stories how he’s only playing a traitor to serve their Creator, or how that’s what he hopes they’ll think. But Sasha told them.

That’s what he’ll never quite explain to Braden, who won’t be a witch but can’t be anything else anymore: what it’s like to be laughed down. What it’s like to rein power in your hands, electric, how you drive your nails into your own palms around it, baiting that laughter. Tom understands a part, actually, and Evgeny another, and they’re both pretending the other won’t. But Braden hasn’t been worth laughing at since that ghoul took his fiancé and what’s left of him, holding on for the boys, went cold.

Sasha tries to give him back a little nutritional slapstick every day. It’ll be good for him, but he hasn’t thanked Sasha for it yet.

They think Sasha is funny, the boys, that first year. Sasha has been a laugh in the halls of Hell for so long, a joke in Russia’s history, and maybe familiarity makes him fond of them.They think he isn’t capable of that, not really, but it’s only that it hasn’t weighed his hands down for centuries. He acts fond of them, though, and they’re incomprehensibly loyal, habit-bound, handsy, and severely under-socialized. When Tom invites him into their uneasy little alliance and the spaces they normally reserve for their raggedy little family, it’s hard even for Evgeny to keep from touching him. Tom feels like he understands Sasha.

Tom is a little dumb.

Tom is addicted, and Evgeny is fighting shadows in the corners of his eyes. TJ is doing his best.

Braden throws a Bible at Sasha’s head, once, after Tom’s grisly little problem has come out and the boys have all yelled their piece and cried themselves to sleep. “Don’t touch him.”

It’s a sign they’re bonding, because he expects Sasha to catch it instead of ripping it in half or his head off. “Don’t tell me what I do,” Sasha says, and Braden’s lip curls, baring his pretty white teeth.

“I don’t want you to touch him,” he repeats, clearly and politely. “If he says he wants to stop the drinking, then you’re a temptation. And I don’t care if it’s a fair deal the way you see it, if he’s already said no and you push, or suggest, or shit, so he changes his mind—I won’t accept that.”

“You wanna take a demon to court,” Sasha says.

“You wouldn’t make a deal bad enough that I could challenge it,” Braden says, eyeing him as Sasha cracks the book’s spine, fluttering its pages. “Pushing Tom would be…unprincipled, and all your contracts rest on that. It would be a bad move, and I don’t think you’ll make it.”

“Hm,” Sasha says, and pauses on a passage he thinks is familiar. It isn’t the relevant chapter, Cain and Abel’s sacrifice, but he’s only waiting to hear Braden take a breath, so he can know Braden knows. When he glances up, Braden meets his eyes.

“Been reading lately?” Sasha asks, stepping forward. Of course Braden’s understood who the boys are, heirs to a long brutal story, the only reason Heaven would ever care about them, but Sasha’s still impressed.   
  
Braden doesn’t say anything, but he can’t look away either.

Sasha slams the book closed and hurls it away, hearing it crumple and tear brutally on the floor as he presses Braden back against the wall, purposefully slow. His free hand explores the gaping collar of Braden’s worn linen shirt, sweeps up from the banks of his collarbones to find the point of his pulse. Sasha feels it hot and thrilling under his thumb, and digs in.

“His choice. Free will,” Sasha says. “Isn’t that what you always say it’s all about? He deserves to know, got the right to choose, and you know—“ he presses harder, breathes the words into Braden’s neck like he can burn them there among his freckles. “Anything you do, think you can keep me from him, lie to him? Only gonna make him like me more when he find out.”

Braden has to swallow, his throat clicking under Sasha’s hand. What was a pleasant Virgina morning is shivering, a new cold dragging at the air around them like a squall is rolling in off the sea. But Braden tips his head, eyes fluttering closed, and Sasha takes it as surrender, and gentles his touch. He can feel Braden counting through a breath.

“I know,” Braden admits.

Sasha lets him go.

“I know. But you know, I keep thinking. Why would a demon—” Braden reaches out to press his fingertips to Sasha’s chest, “—want an angel like Lucifer to win?”

Sasha whoops, spins, throwing his arms wide.

“Why,” he calls out. “Why, why.”

Braden hisses, straightening up properly. There’s still an odd breeze in the house, fussing at his hair and settling his shirt collar back against his bruising throat. “You won’t say that you do or you don’t, will you?”

“Why?” Sasha sings, and laughs until he coughs and Braden’s face cracks, just barely.

The storm is still in the air. But Braden built a kitchen where his ghosts can’t manifest, and Sasha bares his teeth at the shadow of a light hovering behind him in a friendly sort of threat. No reason for ghost to worry, when Sasha will kill anything that might kill Braden first.

Something thumps on the ceiling, then the slither and crash of Evgeny and his heap of blankets falling off the top bunk. “Okay, I’m awake!” Evgeny yells, muffled and unconvincing, and Braden and Sasha both eye each other and look up. “Damn it, Nicky—”

“He got a new boo?” Sasha asks, interested.

“No,” Braden says. “Well….No. That’s what he’s decided to call his angel. You know.” Everything in him lightens when he smiles at Sasha. “I suppose you two should meet.”

Nicky, Sasha thinks. Nicky, Nicky.


End file.
